Word Press Theme Integration – Collected intelligence

Folks, I have been trying to get bbPress to fully integrate into my WordPress site for like weeks. I happened up a gentleman who had it figured out. He sent me his notes and I am giving them to you here. One word of caution, even though I followed the instructions carefully, I still don’t have it working – this doesn’t mean his instructions are incorrect … just that I am not skilled enough to figure out all the elements.

His name is Adam Kayce of Bright Coconut. I hope you enjoy his instructions and they speed you toward full integration (and then if you have time, come help me!).

Integrating the Theme:

I have a link to my forum in my global nav by creating an empty page with a slug that is the same as the directory name as where I have bbpress installed.

Then I went into my bbpress theme and changed every instance of bb_get_header() with get_header(), and bb_get_footer() with get_footer().

Since I want to have my wordpress sidebars show up in the forum, too, I also added get_sidebar() right above the call to get_footer().

I could also add other sidebars, too – the theme I use adds two columns below the main content area and uses the dynamic sidebar functionality to add them in to each page. I could see how adding other or more sidebars and going in to the templates could be really useful.